


Vergessen

by ottertrashpalace



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Caleb Widogast's Backstory, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Victim-blaming, Widogast's Nascent Nine-Sided Tower, bed sharing, but like only a little, could be shippy if you wanted it to be, ep 111, is its own warning, response to what Liam left us with at break goddamn it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26656201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottertrashpalace/pseuds/ottertrashpalace
Summary: What if someone had been there to see Caleb go to his secret eighth floor?
Relationships: Jester Lavorre & Caleb Widogast, Jester Lavorre/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 9
Kudos: 166





	Vergessen

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I already wrote a widojest post-Trent dinner fic. Yes, that one was written after 110 and this one was written after 111. Listen, I just need to see my Wizard Boy get the love he deserves, okay? I literally had a dream about it after Thursday

Tonight, Caleb had outdone himself. Jester couldn’t believe that she was lying on a bed that he had made, with his magic. After rifling through every little drawer and nook in the room, she lost herself for a good few hours staring up at the painting of Nicodranas on the roof of her bed. Mama was waving to her, and she could watch the little ships come in and out of the port. She read a little bit of Tusk Love while she was at it, just skipping to her favorite parts and giggling at how bad the writing was.

Time passed, and she ran out of things to occupy herself with. She didn’t want to start painting now, it was so late at night. But she wasn’t sleepy yet.

I’ll go find Caleb, she thought, and bother him. I bet he’s still up, reading or whatever. Although she did not admit it to herself in so many words, she was also worried about him, after the day they’d had. He probably wouldn’t mind some company.

So she slipped out of her room and willed herself up to the seventh level of the tower (she couldn’t believe that she could do that, it was so cool), and knocked smartly on Caleb’s door.

When there was no response, she tired the knob, and found it open. 

“Caaa-leb,” she called softly, not wanting to wake Nott across the hall. “Are you awaaaake?”

Curiosity overtook her, and she went into his room. It seemed rather plain, she noticed. And untouched. She went into the bedchamber, and the bed was empty— it didn’t even look like anyone had sat on it and rustled the sheets a little bit. She frowned. Maybe he was still up reading in the library?

But as she came back to the amber-wood door, she heard rustling, and peeked out: there he was! I’ll wait here and surprise him when he comes in, she thought. But he did not turn towards the amber-wood door. Instead, he looked upwards, towards the cat’s eye on the ceiling.

“ _Fort, doch nicht vergessen_.” He said, distinctly, and the cat’s eye opened up. He levitated up through the ceiling, and was gone.

Jester stared open-mouthed as the cat’s eye closed again. Why hadn’t he told them there was another floor? What would he be keeping from them? It was his house, she supposed, but still, hadn’t he just been talking about how much he trusted them and how he owed them and whatever? " _Fort, doch nicht vergessen_ " he’d said. It must be a password. Why would he have a password to a secret floor in the magical house he’d built for them? Something about the phrase sounded familiar, and she mouthed it to herself over and over, trying to figure out what it was. She would just have to wait for him to come back, and make him explain himself.

So she staked out against his bedroom door, leaning against it with her head splayed out. She would just wait…

Time ticked by, and before she knew it, her eyes were snapping open with a jolt as she jumped to keep herself from falling over. She must’ve dozed off, and Caleb still hadn’t returned. That did it. She had to figure out what his secret floor was all about. She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should leave him his privacy, but if he’d wanted privacy he should’ve just told everyone not to go into his private eighth floor, not just keep it a secret. “ _Fort, doch nicht vergessen,_ ” she muttered to herself. Well, here goes nothing.

She clambered to her feet and went out into the hall, staring up at the cat’s eye. “ _Fort, doch nicht vergessen_.” She stated as clearly as she could. And she must’ve spent enough time around Caleb to pick up some Zemnian, because the cat’s eye opened, and she willed herself up.

She came into a room of stone doors, all of which looked considerably more ominous than the rest of the Widogast’s Nascent Nine-Sided Tower. She glanced around, and noticed that one door was cracked open. On tip-toes, she went over and peered inside; it was dark, but she could see well enough. Bare walls, old straw. A rusty metal table. Three wooden chairs with—handcuffs? Leather straps? Jester shuddered. I didn’t know he was into that…? floated through her mind before the horror set in. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that she’d found Caleb; he was sitting on the straw, leaning up against the wall, fast asleep. He was still wearing his coat, and his arms were wrapped tightly around his middle. It was kind of cold up here, definitely too cold for a human to be sleeping with no blankets.

What the fuck. What the actual fuck. 

Jester pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside, immediately noticing the smell of rusted metal and … she hoped it was metal she was smelling, and not blood.

She opened her mouth to say Caleb’s name, but before she could, he startled awake, back against the wall. He was breathing hard.

“Caleb?” She managed

“You—“ he stammered, “you are not supposed to be here.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” She worried her lip, not wanting getting any closer to him and scare him more. “What is this place?”

He slumped over, head in his hands. “What does it look like.” It was a voice of a man who was utterly, entirely defeated. Like he’d been caught in a spider’s web and knew what was coming next. 

Jester looked around at the tiny chamber, and the terrible things in it, thinking about the dinner they’d had that night, the tremor in Caleb’s hands after he had finally told them everything. “I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I can guess. Why would you…” she didn’t know how to finish that question. “Are you okay, Caleb?”

“Ja,” he answered in cracked monotone, “good as ever.” Silence.

Jester made a decision, and went over to sit next to him, plopping down on the straw. “I had a great time when I polymorphed into a cat earlier, do you want me to tell you about it?” Her voice sounded weak, even to her own ears.

Caleb just closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the stone wall. He nodded, once.

“Okay…” and Jester told him the story of her evening, letting the words flow out as they came. She wasn’t paying much attention to them; rather, she was watching Caleb, watching as the incredible tension in his shoulders, his forehead, his arms, slowly loosened, just a little bit. She even coaxed a very small laugh out of him. After she finished, she paused.

“I know that you probably don’t want to talk about it, and that’s okay, but… will you tell me what this place is, Caleb?” And a better person wouldn’t have let the fear creep through, but Jester couldn’t stop it. She wasn’t afraid of him, of course, but everything else about this was so strange. She was afraid of what it might mean, of what he might have done to himself.

He thought for a good while. “I don’t really want to tell you,” he admitted. “But I should. You deserve to know.” He looked studiously down at his hands, took a deep breath in. “You saw the glowing lines on my old companions’ arms tonight, ja?”

Jester nodded.

“Well, it is a result of residuum dust being, sort of tattooed into them, I guess. It is one of Ikithon’s greatest accomplishments. He turns his students’ very bodies into weapons.” 

Jester glanced down at Caleb’s arms, covered now, but where she knew there to be countless long, jagged scars. “I don’t understand,” she murmured.

Caleb swallowed and barreled on. “It took him a long time to perfect the technique, it is very difficult. And dangerous. Painful. So, he experimented, on us. Until it was right.”

It all clicked together in Jester’s mind with horrible certainty. “And this room, this was the room where he used to do that.” 

Caleb gave one of those not-smiles that he was so fond of, where his cheeks pinched but it didn’t reach his eyes. Jester felt tears welling up in her eyes. She bit them back for his sake.

“ _Fort, doch nicht vergessen_ ,” she remembered. “What does that mean?”

“It means—ah, ‘gone, but don't forget.’”

Oh. Well, she supposed that this whole tower was all a product of his head. His wonderful, brilliant head, which remembered everything he saw and read with exacting detail. Of course he remembered all of this, and it was here, right alongside the stained glass and the painstaking reconstruction of her childhood bedroom. It was as much of a blessing as a curse, that mind of his.

“Were you going to spend the whole night like this?” She asked gently.

He winced. “I didn’t plan on it, exactly, but I was just... remembering, and I fell asleep.”

“Remembering,” she echoed. “It’s important to remember, Caleb, but you don’t have to torture yourself to do it.”

He frowned. Maybe she shouldn’t have said “torture."

“I just mean—“

“It’s what I deserve,” he said at the same time, flatly.

And at that her heart broke into a thousand pieces. “No, Caleb, it’s not. You don’t deserve this.”

He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes and then down at the floor, his brow furrowing. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t—“ Jester huffed, incensed. “Do you think that Yasha doesn’t deserve to sleep in her bed tonight, Caleb? After all the people she killed, after what happened with Obann? Or Fjord, after he almost released whatever Uk’otoa is onto our world? What about Essek? Do you remember what you told Essek.”

Caleb was angry now. “Ja, I remember, Jester. It is not the same. None of them are the same. I killed my parents, Jester, my own flesh and blood. I did it willingly, not because my mind was not my own, or because I did not know what would happen when I pushed the cart in front of their door and lit it on fire. I was not innocent. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it on purpose.”

The tears she had been holding back were flowing freely now. “I’m sorry, Caleb. I’m so sorry.”

“I do not need you to pity me, Jester Lavorre.”

“I don’t pity you, Caleb. Well, maybe a little bit? Because you were a student of Trent’s, and.. and he did this,” she gestures to the room around her, “and after tonight I know first hand what a manipulative piece of shit he is. But that isn’t the point. I love you, Caleb, and I care for you. And I don’t think, after everything you’ve been through, that you should sleep on a cold floor in a beautiful tower that you built, for us. _All_ of us.”

He just shook his head, seemingly at a loss for words. She saw one tear trickle down his cheek, then another. She scooted a little closer, and careful to give him time to move if he didn’t want her close, wrapped an arm around his shoulders. She felt him shudder, and lean in to her. 

They stayed like that for a long time, as he silently shook, and she cried with him, until they were both worn out. She eventually felt his head press into her shoulder, and his breathing even out. He was asleep. Once she was sure that he was gone, she carefully wrapped her arms around him and picked him up, ever so slowly edging out of the room and into the hallway. He was so light in her arms, too light. They needed to do a better job of making sure he ate.

“ _Fort, doch nicht vergessen_ ” she whispered, and together they descended to the seventh floor, into warmer air and wooden walls. It was then that she finally realized why something about the phrase had seemed familiar. Vergessen. That was the name of the mental hospital, where they had met Trent and inspected the beacon. The place where Caleb had lost eleven years of his life. How fucked was it to name a mental hospital the Forgetting Sanitorium? Icky-thong, she thought with no small amount of malice. And it made even more sense, now. Of course it was important to Caleb that he remember, when for so long he had been forced to forget. 

Still, though, that didn’t make it okay for him to spend the night on a pile of rotten hay in a replica of the room he used to be tortured in. She was so glad she’d followed after him. The thought of him shivering in that room all night was too awful to consider. He shifted slightly in her arms, and she stilled to watch him, but he just hummed and settled in closer to her, still deep asleep.

She took him into his room, onto the undisturbed bed, gently took off his coat and boots, and tucked him in. Fondly, she remembered the last time she’d done this for him, after he’d gotten so drunk he’d waltzed with her and called her Astrid. It tugged at her heart that much more, now, knowing what Astrid had meant to him. What came over her, she couldn’t be sure, but in that moment she couldn’t quite leave him there, so she pulled out his copy of Tusk Love and curled up in the armchair by his bedchamber’s fire, reading lazily until she too fell asleep.

She woke once more that night, to the sound of rustling and heavy breathing. She got up and went to the bed, where Caleb was twitching in his sleep, and muttering under his breath. He cried out, and Jester jumped, as he sat straight up, eyes open, still panting. 

“You’re here, Caleb, you’re safe,” she said. His gaze locked on to her, and he seemed to calm down somewhat. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“You are still here?” He murmured.

“Yeah, of course,” she whispered back, her heart aching for him. 

He frowned “I don’t want to keep you up, it was such a long day…”

“Caleb,” she interrupted, as he trailed off. “It doesn’t matter. I was sleeping, anyway, I just woke up when you were… having a nightmare.”

“Ah.” He glanced up, and seemed to take in his surroundings for the first time. “What…”

“You fell asleep,” she explained, “so I brought you back to your room.”

A flash of anger—no, chagrin—crossed his face. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know,” she shot back with the same stubbornness.

“Jester,” he said, almost pleading.

She felt the tears start to come back, and just held out her arms. He fell into them, easily, and they wound up on the bed together, like that, with Jester just holding him as tightly as she could. All the protest seemed to have drained out of him, and they fell asleep for the last time that night, tangled up together. 

When they got up later than usual the next morning, everyone pretended they hadn't noticed.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, looking up the translation of "Fort, doch nicht vergessen" did actually kill me


End file.
